


Love Language

by inuyashamunkey



Series: Bad Things Happen Bingo [11]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Action, Angst, Angst and Feels, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bad Things Happen Bingo, Best Friends, Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship/Love, Gore, Graphic Description, Head Injury, Heavy Angst, Hunk (Voltron) is a Good Friend, Hurt, Hurt Hunk (Voltron), Hurt Keith (Voltron), Hurt/Comfort, Lance to the rescue, Major Character Injury, Pain, Rescue, Rescue Missions, Suffering, Team as Family, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-26 20:00:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17752526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inuyashamunkey/pseuds/inuyashamunkey
Summary: Hunk loved his team. That wasn't an issue until he realized he was scarily willing to be literally torn apart for them.~Or, Keith is injured on a mission and Hunk sacrifices himself in hopes of saving him.





	Love Language

**Author's Note:**

> I put this up on Tumblr yesterday and completely forgot to post it here. oops. I was v tired.

Hunk had a memory locked deep inside the crevices in his mind, covered in spiderwebs and caution tape. He was thirteen, cooking in the kitchen with his mother when he learned to believe in love again.

His mother and father had always been married, were  _still_  married, he assumed, and he'd never had any first-hand experience on the 'broken' homes his friends and peers waxed poetic about. His siblings were all alive and well, and none of them had ever had to go without necessities or niceties they enjoyed.

By all means, his childhood was ideal; perfect in a way.

He was seven when he stopped believing in love.

Words weren't and never have been his quote-unquote 'love language'. His temperament was as mild as the tastebuds that sat heavy on his tongue, wrong with his family's heavily cultured cuisine and when his mother tucked him in at night, whispering the sweet trio, he found himself echoing it back to her like an announcer speaking into an empty room. How many times had she heard it? How many times had she  _believed_  it?

Falling out of love with love, it turned out, was very easy. Growing up around affection made it difficult for him to understand why he had such a big problem with hearing the words 'I love you' and why he had such a hard time saying them back. He felt like a broken record every time he tried and nobody liked broken records.

Unless, of course, they said what you wanted to hear, even if they were lies.

Falling out of love was like a snowflake breaking in the wind, it was insignificant to the many, to any but the snowflake itself, and many others would follow in its wake, breaking or staying whole at the whims of the chilled winter air. He was a splintered snowflake, balling and melting under the sun and scraping skin that had relied on his dewy softness.

He was fake.

He hugged his mother and father, grinned when his aunt shared old stories. He gave his siblings piggyback rides around the house and played horse with them before he had to go to school, crawling around on his knees and getting his nice, school-designated pants dirty with goldfish crumbs. These were actions of eloquence, well-spoken in a language he didn't understand.

He fell out of love with love once it stopped making sense. Once his friends told him they loved him and then wouldn't let him sit with them at lunch only to decide to switch it up again the following morning. Once his baby sister, only 3, screamed that she hated him more than she screamed anything else, tossing the doll he'd had his mother show him how to stitch up to the ground and leaving it there for the days that would follow.

At the supple age of thirteen, love was completely irrelevant. Until it wasn't, of course. His mother had started to teach him their old family recipes for rich, moist cakes and soft creams that would melt on his tongue. It was something his sensitive tastebuds could handle unlike the chili-ridden foods they ate for dinner once a week and nine times a year. He enjoyed it and, when valentines came around that year, he gave a cake to one of his best friends at the time.

The look she had on her face once she bit into it-- _that_  was love.  _Falling in love_. he could remember: it was a raspberry cream cupcake with chocolate and orange shavings dappled on whipped pink topping; a thing of pride, back then.

_I love you_  isn't the only way to express love to someone. People say it in different ways all of the time.

_"Are you wearing your seatbelt?"_

_"Have you eaten?"_

_"You look a little flushed."_

_"Here, I don't need it anyway."_

_"Text me when you get home safe."_

~

Hunk's breath was loud in his ears--a thundering symphony in an empty library that no other sound could break through.

Focus, Hunk, focus. He needed to breathe; he needed to be able to hear what was going on around him. He pushed his nausea down his inflamed esophagus, acid burning his insides as it went down.

Around his knees was a thin pool of red-black liquid, dampening the sunny yellows of his paladin armor into crispy oranges and eating up the pristine white in between. He tried not to think too hard about it--about  _how much_  there was.

Before him, half of Keith's face was covered in blood. Some of it was drying and flaking around the ears and gluing his unmoving eyelashes together but the rest of it flowed around the sharp angle of his chin, climbing down the curvature of his neck and dripping onto the floor. In a selfish line of thought, Hunk was sort of glad Keith's hair was black. It was matted with blood, some of it flattened or misshapen around the quarter-sized chip taken out of Keith's skull, but if he didn't think about it too much, it would just look like greasy or badly dyed hair.

Yeah, the dirty, unkempt hair of a sleeping teenager. As long as he didn't think about how the wound dipped away from his temple where the baton had bludgeoned him. Didn't think about the bloodied crumble of skull stuck to a strand that was curved towards the ceiling and stiffened with a drenching of blood.

He was going to be sick.

His hands trembled terribly and his lip quaked as he pulled it between his teeth, trying to keep his panicked tears at bay.

_Please, please, please._

He hadn't known head wounds bled this much. Objectively, he'd been told, had heard it on television shows, but it was different from seeing it in person. He tried to tell himself that the sheer amount of the stuff. made it look worse than it was. He didn't believe himself.

His neck tingled as his back faced the door of the room, roughly five feet away from him. He felt exposed and watched, a rat running a maze. Sure, no one had come for them yet, but it wouldn't be the first time someone had let them get away and let them wear themselves down before blindsiding them. Logically, he knew it was unlikely. The rest of the team would be occupying the rest of the ship and anyone that knew where they were were dead a floor below them.

They were in a room with no cameras and no lights other than the one Hunk had engineered into the cuff of his armor and one door. He should've chosen a room with an extra exit, but they were in space, where were they going to go?

He worried about crushing Keith's already fragile skull against the hard flooring as he held pressure to the wound and briefly considered shifting his head, but he didn't have anywhere soft to set it. It just added to his concern.

He breathed harshly through his nose. They needed to move. It wasn't a good idea for him to move Keith with such a serious head injury, that much he knew, but it was better than letting him bleed out to death on the floor of an enemy ship.

With this thought in mind, his teeth peeled the skin off of his lips as he gently scooped Keith's body into his arms. Keith's armor scraped clunkily against his own as he tried to delicately pillow Keith's head on the softer hollow of his arm, taking great care in not knocking him around too much.

Keith's body was heavy and made Hunk's legs shake as he tried to stand carefully. His feet shuffled a bit as he regained his balance with the added weight.

The door was a regular door with a smooth handle that slipped in his gloved hand when he bent at the knees and tilted, trying to reach without moving his arms.

The click and creak of the door opening rang through the empty, bright-lit hallway and Hunk swallowed as he looked from one side to the other, finding it to be clear of any other potentially threatening living entities.

He felt hurried, but his movements were anything but. His joints were locked and stiff with anxiousness as he dealt with the push and pull of his gut versus his mind. His gut said that he should run; Keith might've had a better chance if he ran--but his mind. His mind said that he would drop the delicate boy, that slow and steady won the race.

_"Hunk?"_

The reception was back. Some of his anxiousness left him at the reminder that he wasn't alone. He breathed a sigh. "Lance?"

Lance grunted on the other side.  _"You good? We lost you two for a second there."_

"Keith--" Hunk cut himself off with a short sound. His throat locked up, the heaviness of the situation settling in his chest. Keith was bleeding out in his arms.

_"Are you guys hurt?"_  Lance asked, his voice going tight.

A drop of blood fell on the floor, diminishing the thought that maybe Keith's head had stopped leaking. "Yes. Keith."

There was a brief silence before Lance's voice filtered through again, stronger than before.  _"Get him out; we'll keep everybody else occupied. I'll cover you."_

Ten-year-old Hunk might've doubted him. Eighteen-year-old Hunk had seen Lance sacrifice himself too much to even  _consider_  doubting it. He muttered out a quick thanks before he heard Lance's line disconnect.

~

They managed to make it through an entire floor without seeing a soul. Hunk's feet had started moving faster after an explosion had made the ship tilt on an axis, rocking the steady floor beneath his feet. In a fit terror, he'd almost dropped his precious cargo.

Their enemy-less luck ran out eventually, however. And it ran out in the form of one that Hunk clearly hadn't shot well enough beforehand.

The ma-- _creature_  was shorter than Hunk, but he was built like a tank on steroids. The creature's height would put Hunk at a disadvantage, putting his enemy closer to the ground, and he was just tall enough to make any of Hunk's movements against him awkward.

Hunk hugged Keith tightly to himself, curving his armored forearm over Keith's delicate temple.

The creature's blood glowed a light gray as its blackness seeped down his chest where Hunk had shot him twice. It'd been enough for his companions, but obviously, this one would need more convincing.

"Let us through." Hunk was proud to say his voice barely trembled, only the slightest skip.

The creature snarled, his teeth so white they glowed. He approached with heavy, lumbering footsteps and Hunk fought the instinct to step back.

He couldn't do anything unless he dropped Keith. But what if there were more? What if they snatched or  _killed_  Keith while Hunk's back was turned? His teeth ground together as he thought, his wide eyes locked on the creature that hadn't moved past that first step.

He could run, but he would just dig him and Keith into a deeper hole and that was assuming that he could outrun the thing in the first place.

The creature's back bent as it crouched, his jagged teeth pointing out like spears as his jaw opened. Hunk had a split second to make a decision as it leaped much faster than a thing of its size should've been able to, its mouth poised to bite and it's pristine claws curved outward.

His arms twitched in that second, tightening round Keith before loosening.

_Run._

_Stay._

_Drop your burden._

_Fight._

_Don't hurt Keith._

_Fight._

_Run._

_Keith._

_Fight._

_Keith._

_Keith._

_Protect Keith._

The creature's claws were inches away from him when he turned his back to it. His heart jumped in his chest as he fell to his knees and tucked Keith closely to his chest. His wide frame completely engulfed Keith as he bowed over the small teen.

He nearly bowled over the second the muscled thing crashed into him with a roar, landing claws-first into his back.

Tears pricked his eyes as he heard his armor creak and give way to the sharpness. He felt the claws cut through his thick back like butter, ripping apart corded muscle until it gave way into a sensitive tenderness.

His teeth clenched so hard his jaw trembled but it did little to distract from the burning that spread like wildfire throughout his back. The claws stayed stuck in his back as he felt luxite-sharp teeth graze the sides of his collared neck, gusts of breath displacing the hair at his nape.

His eyes were squinted as he looked down at Keith's blood-encrusted face, tears dripping out of his eyes and onto his cheek. He prayed to whoever was listening that at least Keith would make it out okay, begged the deities to let his team and family know how sorry he was.

Unwittingly, his mind roamed to the faux macademia nut cookies he'd left for Lance on one of the castle's kitchen counters, to their oddly yellow chips. To the look on Sam Holt's face when he gave him a recipe book to take home with him to Earth and the promise that _he_ would be the one to cook for  _Hunk_  when they all got back.

He begged himself not to think about the look on Coran's face as he sat at the kitchen counter for one of his late night teas--the ones where he couldn't sleep because he remembered the screams of his people--and realizing that Hunk wouldn't be joining him.

He didn't want to think about it, but more than anything, he hoped his team knew that he loved them with his entire being; that he would do anything and everything for them and that if it were up to him, he'd stay with them forever.

He wanted them to go home, even if he couldn't. He wanted Lance to go home to his sisters and brothers and tell them stories about the embellished grandeur of their life in space.

He wanted Keith and Shiro to get a break in life, to live happily doing whatever they wanted because, man, they deserved it.

He wanted Pidge to go to university as she'd always planned and go home and be with the family she spent so much time longing for.

He wanted someone to tell his parents that he  _lived_. At least for a little while. That he did more than roll on his back and take it like the coward he'd tried so hard not to be.

Maybe it was selfish, but was it so bad to want to be remembered as a hero?

He whimpered low in his throat as the teeth gripped the metal guard covering his neck and bit down, making it creak loudly in his ears. He was scared. Gods, he was so scared.

He'd never felt more like a child than he had at that moment as he covered his dying friend with his body as he was torn to pieces by creatures that weren't even supposed to _exist_ lightyears away from his family and his home. He wanted to be held by his mother just once more before he died. He was only eighteen, was it too much to ask?

He retched a sob as the metal clamped around his neck, giving in to the force. After a moment, he could feel the tips of the creature's teeth grazing his skin.

He leaned his forehead against Keith's ugly sounds coming out of his throat as he awaited his surely painful fate.

The teeth pierced his skin, setting his blood free in smooth rivets.

_I love you, Keith. I love you, Lance. I love you, Shiro. I love you, Pidge. I love you, Allura. I love you, Coran. I love all of you so much and I hope you know that._

Pain.

Pain and popping sound that gave Hunk a start, flinching.

Hunk's eyes were wide as he felt a heaviness fall against his back, the teeth loosening into a  hold that lacked the crushing force that had been exhibited previously.

"Hunk?"

Hunk sobbed in relief, cautious to move with the monstrous teeth still so close to his neck. In an instant, the weight and teeth were gone and there was a thump to his left. Hunk's vision was blurred with tears as an emotional-looking Lance kneeled in front of him.

Hunk gave him a wobbly smile, snot running down his lips. Lance patted his shoulder. "Are you okay?"

Shakily, Hunk nodded. He felt that his relief was palpable, filling the air and crushing his lungs in a pleasing force.

Lance took Keith from him with a grimace as the state of the dark-haired teen. "Can you walk with your back like that?"

Hunk winced at the reminder and gently shifted his shoulders. "It's numb."

Concern flooded Lance's face but he gave a hard nod. "Okay, let's hurry."

**Author's Note:**

>  **I'm taking prompts for my Bad Things Happen Bingo on Tumblr:** one-trigger-lullaby.tumblr.com


End file.
